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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS
For Mags, Email Is Mobile’s Killer AppWednesday, February 11, 2009 Newsmax CTO Gregory Marchwinski already knew that many of his site’s most loyal readers were viewing their daily email newsletter on mobile phones, smartphones and PDAs. But until last month, when he ran a test of the upcoming Newsmax Mobile service within this e-newsletter, he had no idea just how powerful mobilized email could be. “In our Breaking News we put a reference to the mobile site and asked people to try it out,” he says. “We about doubled page visits for that day.” Now, users who receive the daily email on their phones will be redirected to the mobile version of any content on which they click. As we reported last week, Newsmax went mobile in a formal way in January in partnership with mobile content enabler and ad network Quattro Wireless. According to Marchwinski, several thousand readers were already pulling Newsmax content onto their phones via RSS feeds. “It was plain Jane—no images—and we heard from several people that they had a smart device and we wanted to take advantage of that. Marchwinski customizes an RSS feed for Quattro, including select pieces of the main site and images. The partner handles the many conversions necessary to make the raw feed adapt properly to the many hundreds of available handsets. “It’s pretty much just feed management [for us] and watching the statistics." There is little evidence yet at the main Newsmax site that a mobile version is available, but Marchwinski says a print promotion will begin in March. Nevertheless, the early returns are encouraging without any marketing push. The mobile site is generating 10,000 to 12,000 page views a day. Most articles run about four pages on a mobile device, and a good number of people are reading through the entire piece. The most surprising thing so far for Marchwinski is the popularity of the pundits. The mobile page that collects columnists from around the conservative mediasphere is the third-best-rated section of the mobile site. Newsmax is discovering patterns of mobile media access that started taking shape throughout last year. According to the most recent comScore metrics, by summer of 2008, 33.5 million U.S. mobile subscribers were consulting their email on handhelds, a 4.5% increase over the same period in 2007. When it comes to accessing information via a mobile browser, the reach of the mobile Internet is now 36.1 million. Anecdotally, email providers report an increasing number of clickthroughs coming from mobile devices as people come to expect a landing page experience that conforms to their device. And while mobile users do tend to use their mobile email and browsers to triage content for later use on the desktop, it is also true that they are willing to drill into content that really interests them and stick with it despite the small form factor of the device. The myth of mobile is that people only use the device for short grabs of content. In fact, they are just as likely to use the mobile screen as a window into content they crave. If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com
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